with Bart Campolo

What does it mean to flourish? How can I make the absolute best of my one and only life? If love really is the most excellent way, well… how does it work? Every week, humanist community builder Bart Campolo and his incredible array of guests are all over those questions and more. If you want to pursue better relationships and a better world, join the party, for goodness’ sake!

Have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode? Call the Humanize Me ‘Q Line’ at *protected content*.

The earth is in trouble and nobody seems to care. That’s the observation of Josie, 15, who called the podcast after hearing more and more about humanity’s biggest challenges during science class:

“Hey Bart, I’m Josie, I just turned 15 and I am a big fan of your podcast. So I have this really great science teacher who is one of my favorite teachers ever, and he’s really passionate about a lot of things and will sometimes go on long trains of thought during class. One of the things he comes back to is basically how the well-being of earth is spiraling downhill and we will all be in serious environmental trouble in the near future, what with the spiking population and climate change. And then, once he talks about this, he sort of moves back to whatever lesson we’re doing – you know, Newton’s Third Law or whatever – and then I can’t really focus the rest of the class because I keep coming back to: Wow, we are in serious trouble. Everyone in the world is in serious trouble. Why isn’t this everyone’s first concern at the moment? Why aren’t we all trying to fix this? Is it because it’s such a great truth that no-one wants to actually acknowledge it? So, I guess my main question is: How do we cope with this really high probability that life on earth may be really, really miserable for us in the near future? Thank you.”

Is it even a word? Bart Campolo’s reaction to the anti-semitic shooting in Pittsburg was to reach out to his Jewish friends and ask how they were doing. It made him wonder if there is a way to be actively pro-semitic, and to support Jews more.

To answer this, Bart reached out to the hosts of the most popular Jewish podcast in existence, Unorthodox. Mark Oppenheimer, Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz chatted with Bart in this fun conversation about philo-semitism, stereotypes of Jewish people, the places where people can get to know more Jews, how to be part of a group identity, tribalism and bagel-sniffing.

Unorthodox is a production of Tablet magazine and can be found HERE and wherever podcasts are heard.

A letter this week from a listener who says he’s hungry for community with like-minded secular people is just the latest one like it. But this one couldn’t have come at a better time, or landed on more fertile soil.

Two Sundays ago, Bart Campolo and a team of like-minded people held their first content-driven gathering at his new house in Cincinnati. The theme of the event was, ‘Paying Attention.’ They have decided to hold these meetings once every 2 weeks, with a different theme each week. Bart has a hunch that their material may be of interest to the wider Humanize Me community, and his team are excited to share their format.

In this episode, producer John Wright reads Phil’s letter, and Bart answers by talking about what they’re doing in Cincinnati and what he thinks may be of use to the wider community. If you’d like to read the letter Bart sent out to local friends describing the vision for the gatherings, go to bartcampolo.org/2019/02/letter.

If the content was supplied by Humanize Me, would you be interested in running your own house gatherings? Let us know in the Facebook poll HERE.

You can be forgiven for not being familiar with ‘pyrotheology’, the lifelong philosophy project of Peter Rollins.

In this episode of Humanize Me, Bart Campolo attempts a philosophical deep dive with Pete, a friend of the podcast for years. It’s a very lively, argumentative conversation on the differences between Bart and Pete on human drive and desire, humanism, religion, death, meaning and meaninglessness.

Along the way, the pair touch on dialectics, human evolution, dual instincts, psychoanalysis, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, ontological antagonism, fundamentalism and the death of God.

We recommend Pete’s podcast, The Fundamentalists, where he lays out his ideas to the keen interest of his friend, the comedian Elliott Morgan. For more on pyrotheology and everything Pete, go to PeterRollins.com.

One of our listeners read an interview with Conan O’Brien in the New York Times last week. He sent us this excerpt:

NYT: Is this how you want to go out, with a show that gets smaller and smaller until it’s gone?

Conan: Maybe that’s O.K. I think you have more of a problem with that than I do. [Laughs.] At this point in my career, I could go out with a grand, 21-gun salute, and climb into a rocket and the entire Supreme Court walks out and they jointly press a button, I’m shot up into the air and there’s an explosion and it’s orange and it spells, “Good night and God love.” In this culture? Two years later, it’s going to be, who’s Conan? This is going to sound grim, but eventually, all our graves go unattended.

NYT: You’re right, that does sound grim.

Conan: Sorry. Calvin Coolidge was a pretty popular president. I’ve been to his grave in Vermont. It has the presidential seal on it. Nobody was there. And by the way, I’m the only late-night host that has been to Calvin Coolidge’s grave. I think that’s what separates me from the other hosts.

I had a great conversation with Albert Brooks once. When I met him for the first time, I was kind of stammering. I said, you make movies, they live on forever. I just do these late-night shows, they get lost, they’re never seen again and who cares? And he looked at me and he said, [Albert Brooks voice] “What are you talking about? None of it matters.” None of it matters? “No, that’s the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who [expletive] thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn’t matter. You’ll be forgotten. I’ll be forgotten. We’ll all be forgotten.” It’s so funny because you’d think that would depress me. I was walking on air after that.

Our listener takes this idea of Conan’s and asks: “I wonder why he finds it liberating and I find it depressing?”

Bart Campolo has lots to say about this, and in conversation with John Wright this episode attempts to give an answer. Along the way, hear references to this chess article and this poem.

James Croft is the Outreach Director of the Ethical Society of St. Louis, a longstanding humanist congregation, and one of the largest in the world.

In this conversation with Bart Campolo, James talks about what his congregation is doing to engage with the issues of St. Louis, a place which has made many headlines in the past number of years for racial strife. James subscribes to ‘deed before creed’, an interest less in what people believe and more in what they commit to doing. His congregation is creating safe places to ask questions that people are worried about asking, or which may be loaded, in areas like LGBTQ matters or on topics like white fragility. In addition, he and Bart get into a discussion on the usefulness of protests and revolutions versus better conversations (spoiler alert: they eventually agree that both are of use).